Scenes captured in a digital video may be contaminated with haze, such as fog, dust, smoke, or other particles that obscure the clarity of the video scenes. Users that are editing or playing the video file may need the video to be free of the haze or have reduced haze effects so that the scenes of the video are clearly depicted when played. Removing haze in a video can significantly increase the visibility of the scenes.
Conventional techniques for recovering or reducing haze in videos requires the user to manually determine haze correction parameters on a single frame of the video. Other frames of the video, however, contain different content than the single frame used to generate haze correction parameters. Applying the haze correction parameters determined from the single frame of the video to the remaining frames of the video may not produce the desired output because the content of the video changes frame by frame. The haze correction parameters, tailored for the single frame, if applied to the remainder of the frames of the video produces inconsistent haze removal results. For example, conventional techniques may yield haze removal effects that are visually jarring and disruptive as the video file plays. A digital video with haze reduced based on a single frame of reference may result in one or more video scene being free or substantially free of haze and other video scenes that still include undesired amounts of haze. A digital video with haze reduced based on a single frame of reference may also result in one video scene being darker than a subsequent video scene.
There is a need for automatically determining unique haze correction parameters optimized for each frame of a video and applying the unique haze correction parameters to the respective video frames to reduce or eliminate haze across the video.